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Name: Sadanaga
Country: Japan
Gender: Male
Interests: Writing and commenting on poetry.
Expertise: Concentrating so hard, that my piss changes color.
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Art
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
2/25/2004
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| A short piece about the elephant that stepped on empty Heineken beer cansWhen the zoo was shut down, the people of the town pooled money together to obtain the elephant. It was a worthless zoo, one where it wouldn’t be odd were it to go bankrupt at any time; and the ele-phant was old and tired. It was so old and tired that no other zoo would even consider taking it in. The elephant didn’t look like it would live that much longer, and there were no eccentric zoos that would go to the time and trouble to take in an elephant that seemed to have one foot in the grave.
Even the wildlife dealer didn’t know what to do with the elephant, and extended an offer to the town—I’ll give it to you for free, so won’t you take it in? The dealer said, “It’s old so it won’t eat that much food. It won’t cause a disturbance or anything, either. Nor will it trumpet loudly and be a nuisance to the neighborhood. All it needs is a place. It’s quite a bargain, you know. After all, it is for free.”
After about a month of heated discussion at the town council, it was decided that the town would take in the elephant after all. You could search the entire world, but there just wouldn’t be a town that owned its own elephant. Of course, there’d be a number of such towns in India or Africa, but in the northern hemisphere, at least, there wouldn’t be that many.
A farmer who possessed woodlands offered a place for the elephant to live, and a decrepit ele-mentary school gym that was scheduled to be torn down was relocated as the elephant shack. For food, leftovers from school lunches were sufficient. A retired town hall employee looked after the elephant as the elephant keeper. The town’s coffers were quite full, so they were able to put together easily a budget of this extent.
Besides, it wasn’t as if the elephant was totally useless.
The job that the town gave to the elephant was empty-can crushing. First, a concrete pipe was made in the shape of the elephant’s foot, and it was trained to stick its foot into it when the whistle sounded. On Friday every week, the empty cans throughout the town were collected and delivered to the elephant shack by truck. All kinds of cans—beer cans, soups cans, seaweed cans—were piled up in front of the elephant shack. The elephant keeper tossed into this concrete pipe three-buckets worth of empty cans, and blew the whistle. When the whistle sounded, the elephant stuck one foot into it, and with a loud crunch crushed the empty cans flat, changing them into a single flat piece of metal.
I’m not really sure why the town came up with such a troublesome way to deal with empty cans. If they took care of the cans with a compressor, some-thing like this would finish in an instant. They didn’t have to go so far as to employ an elephant.
Ultimately, I suppose the town wanted to estab-lish a raison d’etre for the elephant in some shape or form. That’s the only thing I can think of. This has to be precisely why the town went to all the trouble of creating a job no one could consider effi-cient for the elephant.
However, at those moments when the elephant and the elephant keeper were crushing cans, they looked very happy. When the elephant keeper blew his whistle, the elephant would promptly put his foot into the pipe and flatten the cans.
Sometimes, I would forget to throw away my empty cans on Friday, and on those occasions I would always take the empty cans to the elephant shack on my own. On Mondays and Tuesdays, both the elephant and the elephant keeper were idle, so they would crush only my empty cans just for me. Once, I had the elephant crush a dozen empty Hei-neken beer cans all together. At the sound of the elephant keeper’s whistle, the twelve Heineken cans turned into one spectacular green sheet. That green sheet shined brilliantly with a glitter like the plains of Africa seen from the sky beneath the sun in May.
By Murakami Haruki
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| Wow, I haven't written anything here in two years.... What gives?
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| To all my students, current and former
Hope all of you are fine. Life in DC and at school is the same. Students come, students go. Ho hum... But you should know that the number of Japanese majors has increased dramatically. Last year we had 10 graduating majors, this year we have eight seniors, eight juniors and nine sophomores. I think we do pretty well for just two full-time faculty. Of course, we are exhausted most of the time.
Anyway, please get in touch with me by clicking on the email link on this Jakuren site. Since our school discontinued the e-mails of all graduates, I feel as though I have lost contact with most of you. If you're a current student and you have a non-school e-mail account, contact me too, so I will not lose you after you graduate. Please get in touch. And I will contact you from my special, super-secret, non-school sensei e-mail account. 
XXOO Your sensei | | |
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